


The virtuous among us

by doomed_spectacles



Series: If I could love like anybody else [3]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angsty Crowley (Good Omens), Character Study, Crowley Loves Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley is Good With Kids (Good Omens), Gen, Light Angst, M/M, Original Character(s), POV Outsider, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-20
Updated: 2019-11-20
Packaged: 2021-02-18 03:48:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21504685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomed_spectacles/pseuds/doomed_spectacles
Summary: Crowley goes to New York in 1968. New York is a great place to hide from your feelings. Until it isn't.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: If I could love like anybody else [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1504748
Comments: 25
Kudos: 159





	The virtuous among us

**Author's Note:**

> I tagged this A/C even though Aziraphale doesn't appear and his name isn't mentioned. This takes place after he hands over the holy water in ep3 of the show, so his actions and the impact on their relationship should be evident. But to be clear, this is a solo Crowley journey.
> 
> Inspired by the songs ["I Want You (She's so Heavy)" by The Beatles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAe2Q_LhY8g) and ["The Fallen" by Franz Ferdinand](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPr_rtqwkX0).
> 
> This doesn't end happily but the show does!

_We've already seen  
That the fallen are the virtuous among us  
Walk among us  
Oh if you judge us  
We're all damned  
_

_-Franz Ferdinand, The Fallen_

[1968]

Rumor had it that a demon was living in the meatpacking district. 

This wasn't entirely true. A demon was _hiding_ in the meatpacking district. He had taken a small place on the fourth floor of an ancient building. Ancient by New York standards, not by his. Everything here felt new and cheap to him. This building had no excuse for feeling old, he'd thought, scowling at the peeling paint and cracking bricks. He'd taken naps longer than this building had been in existence. An elderly woman lived across the hall from him. He couldn't tell where she ended and the shawls she wore began. Sometimes he wondered how someone who couldn't miracle their own heat would survive, but he'd recognized the tenacity it takes to hang on to life purely out of spite when he saw it. The floorboards creaked under his boots when he entered the apartment, and the walls were so thin he could hear the old woman's asthmatic breathing. 

His bedroom was bare except for the bed he'd manifested, a dresser that was old enough but not valuable enough to be called antique, and a mirror he'd transformed into a heavy ornate piece with golden snakes chasing apples down the sides in a fit of vanity. He left the building each day around noon and returned late, swaggering and full of desperation. His feet were never still. He tap danced around the streets of the city. If he were caught standing still he'd have to reckon with himself, so he kept moving. He stepped over crumpled people laying on the street, snapping his fingers as he walked. Some of them found food that night. Some didn't.

Sophie watched him leave his building every day for a month before he let on that he'd spotted her. As he passed that day, he grinned at her with the sort of toothy grimace that made it look like the edges of his mouth were trying to get away from the rest of his face. He made a finger-bang gesture at her and kept walking. His hips swayed back and forth and her bowl found itself full of coins.

She waited for him on the steps of his building the next morning. He appeared, wearing a wine-red turtleneck shirt tucked into very tight black pants. His round sunglasses were tinted black, darker than fashionable. He wore black Chelsea boots that were shiny and unscuffed, untouched by the grimy streets he swaggered down.

"Again? Why aren't you in school? Got kicked out for being terrible?"

"No!" 

He didn't wait for her to elaborate. He started walking at a brisk pace, hands shoved partway into his pockets. She struggled to keep up while carrying her bulky leather schoolbag, empty paper bowl, and a handmade sign that read ' _spare change for an orphan? anything will help_ '. She had drawn happy flowers and a yellow smiling face on it with discarded sidewalk chalk she'd found on the way to school. 

"My sister is sick and she thinks I'm in school but we can't afford medicine so I need to get money," she said all in one breath.

"Well, that sounds awful but it's got nothing to do with me." He looked back over his shoulder at her and scowled, but she wasn't afraid. He talked tough but walked like his feet were trying to do something entirely separate from the rest of him. He pointed at his chest. "Adult here, doing adult things. _Scram_."

She didn't scram. They'd gone several blocks with Sophie trailing behind him, when she finally spoke again. "You can do magic, though. I heard." 

He froze. Then he took off running, banking around a corner to lose her. She followed as best she could but lost him when his curly poof of red hair was out of sight. She muttered under her breath and found a busy intersection to display her sign and set out her bowl. She made $2.50 that day.

The next morning, she hid in the thorny bushes outside his building. When he left at noon, she followed him discreetly. He walked for a very long time. She followed him for blocks, dodging bicycles and traffic and people in suits and people in dingy work clothes and dogs on leashes. Her legs ached. There was something about this strange man she couldn't place. He was restless but not high on drugs or looking to brawl. All energy with nowhere to put it - a desperation that he didn't hide very well.

He'd stopped for a hot dog, which gave her the chance to sit on a fountain and scrounge for wet pennies. When she looked up, she saw his red hair weaving through the crowd and she hurried to catch up. She rounded a corner behind him at full speed and ran smack into his chest.

"Oy!" 

He held one and a half hot dogs. The half-eaten one had smashed into his shirt when she ran into him, leaving a large yellow mustard stain. He held the whole one out to her and she took it. "You're a long way from home, girl-who-should-be-in-school," he said.

With half of the hot dog already smashed in her mouth, she said, "Sophie, not girl." She wolfed down the last half of the hot dog and swallowed. "Thanks." 

He eyed her. "Well then, Sophie-who-should-be-in-school, time to stop following me and scram."

"But you can do magic and I need it," she said, matter of fact.

"You do, eh?"

"Yeah. My sister - I told you. She's sick and needs medicine," she said, licking her fingers to taste the last bit of mustard clinging to them. 

He shook his head. "It's not a good idea. Now go on."

When he didn't say no, something in her broke. Angry tears welled up in her eyes and she wiped at them furiously. She breathed in and out a few times. "Fine! If you can't do magic, then fine. I'll take my business elsewhere," she said. She dared him to disagree with her eyes.

"Oh, that's how we're playing it, eh?" he said, shrugging. "Fine." He bent down so that his torso was on her level and snapped his fingers right in front of her face. "You'd better not follow me. It's going to rain in 90 minutes and you do not want to be caught out here when it does." With that, he turned and sauntered off.

She stamped her foot as he left. She fumed. She walked in circles and muttered to herself. Finally she realized that after he'd snapped, the mustard stain on his shirt had disappeared. "Bastard," she whispered. The gathering clouds above her head indicated he'd been right about the storm, so she turned her feet towards home.

A week later, she found the red haired man standing in front of a bookshop several blocks from where he lived. She spotted him from across the street, standing still among the stream of pedestrians clogging the sidewalk. He looked in the window of the shop but didn't seem to be searching for anything in particular. She crossed to stand next to him. The bookshop he was gazing into was small and old and didn't look very nice. He stared in the window, lost and for once, still. His hands were shoved in his pockets and his face was stone. Somehow she knew he'd been standing there for a long time.

"I've been in here a few times but the owner chased me out. She said I was a miscreant." 

After a long silence, he looked down at her. "That's because you are," he said, without any real heat in his voice.

"My sister says you're a demon."

"That's because I am," he said, tired. "Very smart, your sister. You should go back to her. _Ssscram_." He hissed on the last word.

"I don't think she's right."

"Yeah why not?" he asked.

"Because you're sad." She saw his face crumple like so much paper, discarded. 

His spine curved in on itself and he lost an inch of height. He muttered to himself and gnashed his teeth. "And whoever heard of a sad demon. _Pathetic_!" 

Then he reared his head back and yelled at the sky. "Okay! Okay I get it! I'm taking the bait! Are you happy?" He flung his arms out, still shouting at the clouds. "Are you even listening? I'm being humiliated by a child!"

"I'm not a-" she started, but he wasn't listening. 

He kept ranting to himself, every now and then addressing his complaints upwards. "Go to _America_ , you can be a _proper_ demon in _America_. Can't _go too fast_ in America, 's not possible to go too fast, it's bloody _America_! Sodding lot of good that did!" He snarled, making angry noises that weren't words, not completely. With a clenched jaw, he glared into the window of the bookshop at the confused woman behind the counter giving him a wary look. Finally he looked down at her and said, "I'm being manipulated by a girl with a sign and a cup."

She looked up at him, placid. "Sophie, not girl."

He sighed. "Alright, fine. Where's your sister?"

Sophie led him through the crowded streets back to her neighborhood. It was old and wore its age with a sense of bitterness and stalwart resentment. People sat on stoops outside with nothing in their eyes. She unlocked the outside door carefully with a heavy key on a chain around her neck. They walked up the narrow stairs to the second floor and down the dimly lit hall to the last door. With every step, the floor creaked as if the building itself was aching with neglect. Sophie unlocked her apartment door with a different key and ushered him inside. 

The room was dark and small and smelled of sickness. The heavy curtains were drawn even in midday. A thin layer of dust had settled over everything. A thin voiced called out from the bedroom. "Sophie, is that you?"

Sophie took the man's hand. She'd never asked his name. She led him inside and said softly, "Hazel, I've brought someone who can help."

When she saw the two of them in the doorway, Hazel's eyes widened in her slack, pale face. "You brought the demon? Oh Sophie, why?" She had thinning brown hair and a sharp chin and cheekbones that would have been pretty if she weren't so thin. She pulled the sheet up to her chest, covering her emaciated body.

"He can do magic, he can help!" Sophie led him forward, pulling him by the hand. She looked at him expectantly, then at her sister in the bed that took up all the space in their small room. Light filtered in through the curtain on the window high above the bed and fell on Hazel's face, making it appear ghostly white. A simple crucifix hung on the wall over her head.

"Sophie, go in the other room," Hazel said. 

"But!" Sophie pouted. She didn't let go of his hand and he didn't pull it away.

"Go!" The thin woman pointed to the door with a spindly arm. Her voice was firm, if not strong.

"Fine."

When they were alone, Hazel asked, "Are you going to kill me? I'm ready, if so. But please don't hurt her."

He put his hands in his pockets. "I'm not going to kill you. Even if you ask me to." He nodded towards the door where Sophie had just left. "I won't do that, demon or no."

"You are a demon, then."

He inclined his head, just barely. 

She nodded, then smiled a little. "My stupid sister, goes off to find someone to help me and what does she find? An actual demon." She laughed bitterly. "That's hilarious. Or something."

He smiled but it was nothing more than thin lips in a slightly curved line. His face held no mirth. "Or something. She had a sign made up. _'Anything will help.'_ Somehow I doubt she had demonic intervention in mind when she wrote it but here we are."

Hazel chuckled, then looked pained.

"What you have- I can't cure it. It doesn't get cured. It's too big a fix to explain," he said. His voice wasn't cruel.

"I know. You don't cure cancer, not this kind. But who tells an eight year old that?"

A companionable silence fell between them, a dying woman and the demon at her bedside. She took slow breaths in and out. He didn't need to, but he did as well. 

"I can give you five years. Slow it down a bit."

"Why?"

He shook his head. "Don't. Just get her back in school and make a plan. For her. For when."

Hazel nodded. The demon raised a hand from his pocket and snapped his fingers. She didn't feel any different but somehow she knew she'd live for five years and no more.

"You're not a demon," she said. She meant it.

He sighed heavily and took off his sunglasses. "I am." He leaned in close to her face. His snake eyes glowed in dim light, almost entirely yellow. He spoke slowly and deliberately, wanting her to understand every word. 

"I am a demon from Hell and I was conned by a little girl with a cardboard sign. I am six thousand years old and right now I'm so damned tired of this world."

He put his glasses back on and straightened. 

"Anthony J. Crowley, demon. Sap. Complete and utter fool. You won't remember it, though."

He turned to go, snapping his fingers as he closed the door.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/doomed-spectacles) as well.


End file.
